New Generation Of Migrant Workers In China
“If I don’t have land, am I still considered a farmer?” Wei Xuexia, a 22-year-old peasant turned migrant worker asked a Economic Information Daily reporter playfully.
Wei works in a shoe factory in Shanghai. Her official place of residence is her hometown – a village called Weiyao in east China’s Anhui Province – but she has no land of her own. Though she has no plans to go home in the near future, she longs for a plot of land in her own name.
In Anhui and neighboring Jiangsu, a new social group has emerged – landless migrant workers. They have become a cause for concern because, if they can’t find jobs, whether they stay in the cities or go back to their villages, they will have no means of supporting themselves and may become a threat to social stability.
A new social group: migrant workers without land
Wei didn’t get a share of land because her family violated family planning policy. Many migrant workers have the same problem; as farmers, they don’t have land; as workers, finding continuous employment is far from certain.
Mayor Sun Yunfei of Fuyang City in Anhui says there are two reasons for the emergence of landless migrants. One is violation of family planning policy, the other is that land distribution under the policy that allows farmers to lease plots for 30 years was implemented in the 1980s, before the new generation of migrant workers (who are mostly in their 20s) were born.
According to statistics from the Fuyang Labor and Social Security Bureau, of 2.28 million migrant workers in Fuyang, 600,000 are landless; and 100,000 new landless laborers arrive in the city every year.
The marginal man: a migrant worker without land differs from a farmer who lost land
A landless farmer is not the same as farmer who has lost his land. The latter emerged in the process of urbanization. They not only received large sums of money in compensation, but also were given government help with employment, social security and medical treatment. But a landless farmer has no such rights.
Wang Kaiyu of Anhui Academy of Social Sciences divides migrant workers without land into three categories: those who settle down in the city and receive medical and social insurance; those who work in the city for many years and face unemployment when they get too old to work but stay in the city and become a new class of urban poor; finally, those who return to their hometowns to farm their parents’ or relatives’ land.
Most migrant workers are likely to belong to the second and third groups. When they can no longer work, whether they stay in the city or return home, they will have difficulty making ends meet.
Talking about her future, Wei Xuexia says, “I’ve no plans to go home in the next few years. But eventually, I will have to. I’m working in a factory now and get a monthly salary. I haven’t thought too much about how the future will be without land to farm. I will just have to wait and see how it turns out.”
Migrant workers without land: a possible threat to social stability
Village cadres say almost all young people leave to look for work after they finish school rather than staying at home to farm the land, so shortage of land isn’t an immediate problem. But if the problem gets worse, migrant workers without land could possibly become destabilizing factor in society.
Various solutions have been proposed: one would be to comprehensively and systematically investigate the status of this group of people and take measures to provide for them; another would be to reform the village land distribution system; yet another would be to increase the pace of urbanization and change the status of migrant workers who want to stay in the cities to make them officially urban residents.
Abandoning the countryside
Investigation shows that more and more of the new generation of migrant workers are choosing a way of life that is very different from that of their parents. They are quitting agricultural production and abandoning country life. They depend less and less on the land and the trend is towards permanent migration to the cities.
Wang Kaiyu divides the new generation of migrants into two groups: those who left to work in the cities as young adults, and those who were taken to cities as children by their parents. They latter have grown up and been educated in cities and it seems natural for them to stay on and look for work.
Compared with the first generation of migrant workers, today’s migrants are better educated and have wider career choices.
Liu Kun, 22-year-old, originates from a village in Anhui Province but now runs a fishing tackle shop in Shanghai. He came to Shanghai with his parents at the age of 10 and was educated in primary and junior middle schools specially established for children of migrant workers and later at a technical school. In the 12 years since he left his hometown, he has only been back three or four times. “My household registration is still in my hometown, but I can’t even remember the exact location of our village. I know hardly anyone there and my accent has changed so much that I can’t speak the local dialect any more.”
Liu has no intention of going back to live in his hometown. In Shanghai there are huge numbers of migrant workers, like Liu, who grew up in cities and are accustomed to city life. Moreover, more and more of those who grew up in rural areas also want to stay in the city permanently.
Jiangsu Province official Cao Bingtai points to a recent study in which 15 percent of young migrants said that they would never under any circumstances leave the city to live in their hometowns. It shows that the new generation has adapted to life in the cities and is unwilling to return to rural life.
Demand for equal access to public services
What migrant workers and their families want most of all is equal access to education, medical treatment and employment, and official household registration.
For migrant workers, educating their children is still a major problem. Wei Ping, who has a young child, says, “My child was born in Shanghai and is six years old. But the quality of education in schools for children of migrant workers is not good. And it’s impossible to send the child to a local school unless you have a certificate proving you own a property in the city.” She and her husband can afford to live in Shanghai, but are far from having enough money to buy an apartment.
If these kinds of issues are not resolved there is a danger that people will start to return to the villages. Urbanization will go into reverse which would be against the trend of normal social development.
The government of Kunshan City in Jiangsu Province is trying to address some of the problems. The city Education Bureau has ruled that children of migrants can attend local state schools if their parents have stable jobs and obey family planning policies. Migrants who have owned property and paid pension contributions and medical insurance for more than three years, or have signed contracts with enterprises, are allowed to change their household registration. Around 10,000 migrants eligible under these rules register as Kunshan residents each year.
New migrant workers: we’re not farmers any more
Although Yuan Fenglin was already well off in her hometown in Anhui, the 24-year-old chose to look for work in Kunshan. Talking about her move, she said, “I wanted to learn more about the world while I’m still young; earning money wasn’t the main reason for moving.”
Another difference with the older generation is that new migrants are less concerned about how much they earn than what they can learn about the outside world from life in the city.
A recent poll showed that 54.2 percent of the new generation of migrant workers left for the city to broaden their outlook and for self-development, as against only 39.1 percent who were purely motivated by the prospect of earning money.
‘I consider myself a worker’
Wei Qin comes from Weiyao Village in Anhui but works in a medical equipment factory in the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu. She doesn’t think of herself as a farmer, as her life is no different from that of other workers. Her basic salary is 1,000 yuan per month but when business is good she can earn 5,000 to 6,000 yuan per month. “I consider myself a worker now. Even if I went back to my hometown someday, I wouldn’t know how to farm the land.”
Most of the new generation of migrant workers have lost their identity as farmers. In a poll of 2,500 migrant workers in manufacturing and construction, only 8.7 percent thought of themselves as farmers, while 75 percent identified as workers.
The surveys reveal a new generation of migrant workers facing a contradiction between their aspirations and China’s current social reality. They hope to merge into the general city population but still harbor doubts that it will be possible. A sense of being marginalized persists along with a weak sense of belonging to their adopted cities.
The chief of the Research Bureau of the Anhui Federation of Trade Unions, Zhao Zixi, says the modernization of Chinese society lies in urbanization, and urbanization means transforming farmers into city-dwellers. The question is, at what pace should the change take place? Too slow, and the process of urbanization will be obstructed. Too fast, and the cities will be unable to absorb the new residents. Both should be avoided.
Topics: business, China, Economy, employment, environment, Governance, jobs, landless migrants, migrant farmers, migrant workers, migrants, social stability, society
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